It's a new year, and we're changing things up around here. While I am not 100% on board with a real curriculum at this age -- and even less sure of a classical one at that, the boys and I are about to start a voyage on the classical conversations ship. We've found a few friends that will sail along with us, and we're ready to ship off next week. We are starting with cycle 1 (the national group is on cycle 2, but we're not worried about syncing up with them).
We've also started online piano lessons using adventus childrens musical journey. So far they've both done the first two lessons. I need to find a way to include one lesson per day (they are quick lessons for now... they are just learning high keys/low keys/middle c. The high keys are the bird notes, the low are the whale notes and middle c is a hairy guy in a boat... In the beginning, you "read" the birds and whales like music. The third lesson is short/long and the beginnings of rhythm. It incorporates a few nice elements: Beethoven is his teacher, and he defines a lot of vocabulary along the way. They play a lot of classical music at the start/end of each leson/practice and let you know the title and author. I don't really like that the program isn't smart enough to know if you get a concept or not. Nic is sitting next to me doing lesson #3, and I don't think he gets rhythm at all, but they just passed him along -- it wasn't even obvious when he did it wrong or right and they let him advance to the next lesson. I would prefer he master the concept before advancing... For now...I'll say its worth $11.00/month -- much cheaper than a real instructor...
I've been thinking a lot about foreign languages as well. I took 2 years of Spanish in middle school, 4 years of latin in high school, a year of japanese in college and am fluent in... English. I REALLY want to teach my boys at least one other language (ideally a few!) and I've always wanted to learn Italian. It has been my intention until now for us to all learn Italian together (all my calendar materials are written in both). BUT, there are soo many resources around us for Spanish. There is an entire row of childrens books written in spanish in our library (two books total in italian). Lots of movies have both english and spanish versions (we have a few that have french options as well, but I have no desire to learn french). So much to ponder...
We're also going to start using handwriting without tears. Nic taught himself to write the capitals, but needs to learn the lowercase letters. ANd Joe doesn't write well at all, although he tries so hard. I think its time to do a few letter of the week activities and get some writing going on...
Lots to figure out... I'll probably find my groove right as summer hits... of course, the nice thing about homeschooling is that it really doesn't matter. We still have to fill our days with stuff... and since I refuse to do more than 1-2 hours a day on true school type stuff, we'll still have plenty of time for summer stuff...
